Top/plan panning/zooming sluggish in VW2018

[line-weight 312]

One of 2017's selling points was a new graphics module which was to make viewing large 2d drawings smoother and faster. I think it did.

 

But I'm finding that this has gone in 2018. Zooming in and out is slow and jerky, like it's really struggling with the file size.

 

If I try opening the same file in 2017 it's noticeably better.

 

Are others finding the same?

[Art V 203]

34 minutes ago, JimW said:

True. It also means that once we get the offended components ironed out, the speed jumps will be SIGNIFICANT for people who have thrown high quality hardware into their workflows, which is some good news.
 

Separate most likely, the majority of the bugs actively being tracked now related to slowness are reproducible immediately upon launch and don't mention waiting for any period of time before issues arise. I suggest if you have a case where this happens that you post a separate thread and we can work through it.

Thanks for the info, then I'll wait for the current speed/lag issues to be (mostly) fixed to see how this affects my workflow. By that time there will probably also more information about Ryzen/Threadripper vs Intel 8xxx performance for making a choice.

 

Regarding the it looks like it could be a memory leak thing I'll get back on that later when it happens again so that I can give more specific details other than it seems to start slowing down.

[Art V 203]

On 12/15/2017 at 11:26 AM, line-weight said:

One of 2017's selling points was a new graphics module which was to make viewing large 2d drawings smoother and faster. I think it did.

 

But I'm finding that this has gone in 2018. Zooming in and out is slow and jerky, like it's really struggling with the file size.

 

If I try opening the same file in 2017 it's noticeably better.

 

Are others finding the same?

Yes and no, for the files where the slowdown gets down to killing in VW2018 it is still quite slow in VW2017 and speed is near instantaneous in VW2016 in my case. (snaps being on when on a sheet layer is considerably slower than snaps being off for the involved drawings).

Though I didn't notice the slowdown in VW2017 as much as I did in VW2018 and then compared with VW2017 and VW2016 and then noticing VW2017 can be slower than VW2016, so I consider VW2018 to be worse than VW2017 anyway. Even though there was definitely an improvement for viewing large 2D drawings in VW2017 compared to VW2017. Working with such drawings is where VW2018 is currently aggravating a lot.

[willofmaine 64]

10 hours ago, Art V said:

Another thing I forgot to mention/ask is that things seem to start slowing down after working for a while in a drawing, almost as if there is a memory leak going on. Is this related to the same issues you are tracking or would that be a separate issue?

 

I have this problem, too.  It's often immediate after updating section viewports, otherwise it can take quite a while to gradually get slower.  I especially notice it when I'm searching for something in the research browser, such as "----d----o----o----r----" and each letter takes it's own sweet time to make an appearance in the search bar.  It's resolved by quitting and restarting Vectorworks.

 

By the way, while I'm thinking of it, LOVE the searchable resource manager.  Huge time saver.  Maybe someday classes, in the Navigation Palette, could be similarly searchable?

[Ethan R. 23]

I'm having similar issues.

 

I'm on a new PC with a 1070 Max-Q card -- It seems as if the card is not being used at all?

2D or 3D - Wireframe or Open GL ??

 

Is there something I need to do to force VWX to use the fancy dancy GPU card ??

[Jim Wilson 2,050]

1 hour ago, Ethan R. said:

I'm on a new PC with a 1070 Max-Q card -- It seems as if the card is not being used at all?

2D or 3D - Wireframe or Open GL ??

If Tools > Options > Vectorworks Preferences > Display > Navigation Graphics is set to Best Compatibility, the GPU will not be used.

However, post the dxdiag from that machine with Vectorworks running and I can confirm a few other things:

 

[Ethan R. 23]

Hi Jim

 

Sending to you.

 

I have a USB 2nd Monitor running right now.

But the slow down is wiith or without it.

 

Thanks

Ethan

 

I

[Jim Wilson 2,050]

3 minutes ago, Ethan R. said:

But the slow down is wiith or without it.

 

Looks like you're only using the integrated card. This can normally be fixed by doing the following:

First, close all other applications, then download and install this:
https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/130633

Reboot your machine, then follow these instructions to force your machine to use the dedicated GPU for Vectorworks:

 

[Ethan R. 23]

OMG - I feel this will be life changing !!!!

 

Running out - will do this evening!

 

thanks!

[Ethan R. 23]

Hi Jim,

 

It is a bit better - once the file is drawn and loaded.

Also - my screen flashes to black sometimes while it is redrawing?

Is this normal?

 

Ii sent you the file in a private chat.

Could you open it and check it on your machine?

 

Yes, There are a lot of tables and chairs - but its not a skyscraper or anything extra complicated

 

Thanks
Ethan

Edited February 16, 2018 by Ethan R.

[Dubman 4]

My new computer zooms in & out much better than before with my older computer and Pans better even with larger files. I even cut rendering time on one model from 42 minutes to 6.2 minutes. So far everything from opening & navigating is working faster. My only lagging issue is closing the software, often at the top menu bar it says VW not responding. This issue happened a lot with my previous computer.

[Asemblance 11]

Also suffering from this issue big time - I was blaming it on the lack of dedicated GPUs in our office machines, and basically harassed our business manager until I was furnised with a new Imac pro (which is specced well above Vectorworks requirements).

 

However the problem of extremely slow pan/zoom/redraw time on sheet layers is still persisting, must say it makes working a real pain! It seems to exist even in relatively simple drawings, and gets pretty much unworkable on A1 sheet sizes and upwards.

[Dubman 4]

I'm still fighting with Windows 10, my first time having to use this operating system, they have so much crap running that I do not need that keeps slowing my system down thru out the day. I have turned a lot of things off & gained faster response to drawing with VW. It drives me crazy that at certain times thru out the day everything if very responsive in VW but then, when something is needed quickly I end up having a 5 second +/- lag on each thing I do, from delete or just seeing the object appear in the Object Info Pallet. I keep going to the Task Mgr and stopping task that are running and sometimes loosing my desktop and other things in not knowing what I am stopping. I wish there was a button to optimize my system to just run VW & stops everything else until I need it.

Also I just received the best advice from the service rep of my new pc computer on updating the Nvidia graphics card driver, he told me not to just update the driver, but to do a clean install. there is a button that you can select for a custom install the removes the existing completely and installs the new version.

[Mark Aceto 45]

On 2/12/2018 at 11:47 AM, JimW said:

I had thought so initially as well until I saw how many possible problems can (and did) arise just from switching it over even when not adding new functionality. Modernizing such a deep system sometimes going back into decades-old code with huge numbers of ties to more recent systems. 

Combined with how much slower things would have been in the meantime if we hadn't done OpenGL, then Plan editing etc in phases, it made sense to roll it out in waves. If we hadn't, we would be WAY worse off than we are now with even more major slowness across the board. Changes have happened/are happening to the Beta program so that major features like this will get way more of a shakedown than in previous releases before they go public so that in the future bigger changes could be done in bigger chunks and there wouldn't be any Day 0 nasty surprises, but the Beta program isn't done being updated yet so some features are being handled differently than others.
 

Apologies if I have misled anyone here in this way. A lot of my work involves going back and forth between Engineers and Users and sometimes terminology used by both can have different definitions in different contexts.

For Engineers, "Top/Plan" is the geometry drawn on the design layer in Top/Plan view. For a user, "Top/Plan" would also functionally include DLVPs, highlighting, control handles, but for an engineer those are different systems entirely and are handled in very different ways. The mistranslation and lack of clarification however would still rest on my shoulders, I'll try to be more clear in the future when I discuss this topic in particular. As complex as Vectorworks can be on the surface, I assure you the internal workings are an order of magnitude more so. A lot of development work like the porting of plan graphics to the VGM is part of a larger attempt to simplify and streamline it's underlying components.

 

This is the only feature that matters in VW 2019. I'm sick of seeing my 10-core workstation with 16GB of VRAM maxed out at 120% CPU on the only core that VW is capable of using, so that I have to force quit the application, and lose my work. This is unacceptable. No more new features. The maintenance release is long overdue.

[Dubman 4]

Now that I've gotten Windows 10 Task running other times than when I am working I do not have any problems in zooming in & out, switching between viewports & design layers, and this is with a floating pane open, photos open, and large SketchUp files open. This new computer of mine is much quicker at everything in VW that my previous computer, especially for RW

[Jim Wilson 2,050]

9 hours ago, Mark Aceto said:

This is the only feature that matters in VW 2019.

Good! I think you'll be pleased.

[Art V 203]

18 hours ago, JimW said:

Good! I think you'll be pleased.

I know you aren't allowed to spill any beans on this until (semi-)officially announcing it, but are you allowed to let us know when you can? 😉

 

Seriously now, the one things I'd like to know is if this new and (hopefully) great stuff would improve things quite a bit on fairly recent systems (e.g. up to 3 years old) matching the requirements or that it would be really good on current systems but only ok(-ish) on older systems?

 

Or put it differently, could I go for a new shiny system or would it be better to wait until the new version comes out to see if the speed/lag issues have indeed improved on the current computer because if it hasn't then even a new system might not be much of an improvement in that area for the speed/lag issue?

[Jim Wilson 2,050]

5 hours ago, Art V said:

but are you allowed to let us know when you can? 😉

I will probably be able to spill a bean or two starting in June and increasingly so until release, but honestly I don't have my hands on the official plan yet (There are Project Plans for everything these days!) so that may change. We do still plan to share development news this year regardless.

 

5 hours ago, Art V said:

Seriously now, the one things I'd like to know is if this new and (hopefully) great stuff would improve things quite a bit on fairly recent systems (e.g. up to 3 years old) matching the requirements or that it would be really good on current systems but only ok(-ish) on older systems?

 

Or put it differently, could I go for a new shiny system or would it be better to wait until the new version comes out to see if the speed/lag issues have indeed improved on the current computer because if it hasn't then even a new system might not be much of an improvement in that area for the speed/lag issue?

 

Well, its almost ALWAYS better to wait as long as possible for a hardware upgrade, since youll get the most bang for your buck. However, the jump we had in GPU requirements will likely be fine for at least 2-3 versions unless things go dramatically in another direction development-wise. Moving Top/Plan and all to the VGM meant a big system req change, but the other systems being moved over afterwards share those same requirements, they don't need even greater power to be taken advantage of. 

[Art V 203]

8 minutes ago, JimW said:

Well, its almost ALWAYS better to wait as long as possible for a hardware upgrade, since youll get the most bang for your buck. However, the jump we had in GPU requirements will likely be fine for at least 2-3 versions unless things go dramatically in another direction development-wise. Moving Top/Plan and all to the VGM meant a big system req change, but the other systems being moved over afterwards share those same requirements, they don't need even greater power to be taken advantage of. 

Thanks for the info, my current system should be plenty ok for most of what I am doing in VW, except that rendering may take a bit longer but that is ok as most renders are not really complex. So this means I can wait a bit with upgrading to a new system until after the upcoming VW release. (I may want to go for a new system anyway because of other software but there is no rush there either at the moment).

[Jeremy Best 41]

On 5/10/2018 at 11:17 PM, Dubman said:

Now that I've gotten Windows 10 Task running other times than when I am working I do not have any problems in zooming in & out, switching between viewports & design layers

Hi @Dubman, I have a couple of users in my care experiencing a slowing down of Vectorworks 2018 over 2-3 hours that might benefit from your finding. - Can you please elaborate on what Windows 10 "Task"s you disabled that improved performance so much? And where/how you did this? 

 

Thanks! 

Jeremy 

[Dubman 4]

Jeremy, unfortunately I did not record everything that I was turning off in the Task Manager. The main thing I did was to have the Task Manager open in my second monitor while working & when I would get delays or slow downs, I would watch what was running with the most usage & turn it off. Sometimes after getting a 5 to 10 second delay in VW I started turning lots of items off which may have been to much, one time I lost the windows task bar, but was able to press Control, Alt, & Delete to restart the computer & get it back. The other thing I did was to record the time I would have these delays & go to the Task Scheduler. Now this is a new PC with Windows 10 which has lots of things running at different times. So I went into the Task Scheduler & selected each item one at a time and changed the schedule of when it is to run. Windows of course has many things running constantly thru out the day that I turned off & some things we can not turn off, like the Cortana assistant, where you can type anything to search or ask questions. Then I am required for work to have Drop Box, which syncs your computer to the server often thru out the day. Then I go Office 360 so I could use between my house in NC, my temp. office in SC, and at my temp condo in SC, it is the same, constantly syncs your computer to the server. I've even started turning these off until I need them. I do not anything about macs on what you can turn off, but would check into it. It would be great to have a tech person that know of all of these things running to know if they can be turned off. All I can suggest is to try things & see what happens, you can always turn them back on. Also keep a log of the times the computer or program slows down so a tech person could help identify what is running at these times. 

[Aspect_Design 80]

I’ve bounced between my 12 core threadripper (now overclocked to 4ghz) with 32gb ram, 1080gtz and my wife’s 27" iMac with a core i5 3.4ghz quad core with 8gb ram and a 4gb video card and it is considerably more responsive and stable than the pc. Aside from the sluggish zooming the oip flashes like a disco when you update something or even just selecting some thing - and then eventually it’ll just vanish like it was never open (if anyone was a Cubase user circa v3 it was dubbed a ‘poof’) 9 times out of 10 doing something with Windoor. The Mac doesn’t do this, crash and is considerably snappier - it’s low end by comparison. Overclocking the pc only made a marginal difference.. so I’m of the opinion after a/b-ing things the Mac version is more refined in using system resources. Now if Apple can just hurry up with those (fingers crossed they match imacs) monitors...

[Dubman 4]

I've had to set my Navigation Graphics setting to Best Compatibility to get faster zooming on 2018 VW. Any other setting it becomes sluggish & slow

[Art V 203]

That is a bit odd as for me SP4 solved quite a bit of the lag issues. Of course I could just be lucky.

 

How is your RAM memory configured? There are reports that in some cases with some memory modules in certain configurations the clock speed may revert to 1866 MHz or slower instead of the wanted 2933 MHz. Which is why I went with 2400 MHz memory that should keep its speed at all configurations for that manufacturer and memory model, but that also depends on the manufacturer, memory type and the number of modules used, so you may want to check your memory configuration against your motherboard's  qualified memory lists to see if the issue might be in part with your RAM configuration.